Everything is falling apart but it's Friday and we can still make good art, goddamnit.
I painted a simple mural on a blank wall in my house and it brings me such joy! Just some freeform wavy lines in funky colors, but I love it. I want to work my way into small outdoor murals and bring more public art to my city.
Last thing my band did was released in 2019, but I've been writing during the pandemic and we're ready to hit the studio soon. Tried auditioning some new people, but nothing has really worked out super well, so we're gonna stay a 2 piece. I tune my guitar down to F, so we get away without a bassist. We play instrumental doom based on HP Lovecraft's mythos.
Actually getting some new guitar gear today - if anyone cares, a Fairfield Shallow Water pedal. Gonna go plug it into my rig either today or tomorrow mornign to check it out. I play an aluminum baritone EGC standard, into a Matamp GT120 and Tyrant Model T clone, into a Sunn 6x10 and Tyrant 6x10 (that originally belonged to Bongripper). Sometimes use an Earth 2x15.
If any metalheads want a bandcamp link, everything is NYP, so just DM me. I posted it once before, and people reminded me that I was basically doxxing myself so I deleted that account for the sake of my drummer (he's a fellow lefty, but not as terminally online as me). Or if you wanna talk guitar gear, I'm always down to have a conversation.
I'm in the process of making an EP which I plan to release in late August. Usually I give up on creating things after one month, so it's good to see me actually dedicate myself to something. Also, since January, Ive been working on a comic that I plan to release later this year.
Awesome! Yeah, keeping up with projects that take longer than a month to finish is always a struggle.
Finishing up rewriting Year 3 of my lesbian webserial Urasaria Academy, starting to feel "year fatigue". The issues with Year 3 stemmed mostly from its main character's poor development in the originally, which caused me to compensate by writing more plot-based arcs; these naturally bore me compared to character-based, as you can complex a character far more richly than a plot.
Fortunately, the first arc of Year 4 features a Neo-Nazi villain I'm very excited to rewrite. He is a scared, angry little white boy who is never as intelligent as he thinks he is, and thoroughly fucks up his own life in pursuit of revenge, ironically recapitulating the very emotionalism which he claims to abhor. Given the arc originally sees him fail an assassination attempt on our hero Mia, who retaliates by torturing his father for information on his whereabouts, I believe it will be a good opportunity to invert typical revenge tropes -- Edgar as the 'hero' seeking to avenge his fallen comrade, Mia as the 'villain' who wins due to her ruthless realism as opposed to Edgar's sentimentality.
One idea I have for a scene is where, in the past, his ICE agent ladyfriend scolds him, and he compensates for his embarrassment by cussing out a Mexican boy, and crouching up like a petulant child when he gets home. I'm unsure yet whether I'll include the dialogue where he justifies his own anti-Semitism by talking about the complicity of the Allies in the Holocaust, because while it would be very Third-Man-ish to have the evil man truth-tell, I am not sure many readers will understand why I am doing it, and I hate to cause controversy.
Otherwise, my favorite thing I wrote recently was Mia's speech given to her fellow superpowered students, detailing how she murdered her psychotic rival.
spoiler
"Before I continue, I feel it is necessary to give an overview of my beliefs about Kirihara. I have always felt that she was like some character in a perverse play. So much of what I would deem wrong with her stemmed from this dissonance between herself and the species we all share. Philosophers and criminologists have pondered over what causes such a creature, as had I, at first; yet I soon realized that it was useless for me to attempt to trace back the pulsating web of life that had resulted in her.
I felt that for all my queries of 'why?', I would eventually only be answerably by 'because': that the reason for parts of her existence were simply due to the reason that, logically, there needed to exist something there. This was not a satisfying answer for me, but it was one her mentor had come to. We often believe that one thing must necessarily cause another, as if we might reduce the cast of life into which we are molded into discrete chains of events; yet to do so is to deny free will and human choice. And, admittedly, I simply lack any other explanation of Kirihara.
She was guided only by bits of her perverse nature; she lacked any logic and morphed her own morality into whatever suited these myriad shards of herself, directed only towards her own ends. She had no ability for extended thought or reflection, and she seemed to despise both. When I looked at her, yes, she would seem to be possessed of an interior; but it was all surface. She was not a shell nor husk of a person; she had always been like this. And I believe that to say otherwise, or to say that she might have ever been an intelligent human being... it simply isn't how humans are.
There were times where I would watch her on campus, mostly to avoid her. I saw her vacant gaze taking all of the universe in, yet she grazed upon none of it. And perhaps at some level she was aware of how internally barren, for nothing seemed to wind her up further than when I, in our various confrontations over the years, would call her vacant or stupid. Her impulse and instincts were driven by animosity alone, and she rejected anyone which may have made her a better person. The circumstances she crafted about herself were done with no regard for its consequences or how others would view her, as a result, yet still all that stemmed forth from her was bile and blame towards others.
But, she had scanned the Revenant before I could do so. As she attempted to flee on Carve, I blasted her off from it and into a nearby building. I heard her bones break. For a moment I thought I might have smitten her with a single geyser of water. Soon, she staggered up. She was sullied, cowed. To my view, her face seemed to merge into snippets of people and un-people who I have known in my life, hosts that I have killed, or those who have in my past disrespected and tried insolence towards me. I had made her ubiquitous through my life, so that I might tow hatreds that still thin my lips and cause my fingers to gnarle.
I attacked her. There was no fight from her, or rather none that could have any success against me. I tilted her into panic, and fear and its subsequent followers soon appeared upon her; her usual mode of existence asserted itself, and she begged and cowered, crying in pain as she reached out to strike me. I continued to hack and burn at her until she was dead. I disintegrated her body, and given the numerous issues with her mother that Kirihara often gave up to others, seemingly without any provocation -- I doubt any relatives will appeal my judgment."
